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The Purloined Manuscript,

Lenos Verlag, Basel, April 2016 ISBN: 978-3-85787-467

On the morning of April 16th, 2015, the renowned medievalist Richard Merak is found dead at the Inselhotel in the city of Constance, on the very day he was due to give the keynote speech at the 600-year celebration of the Council of Constance. Laura returns to her hometown Basel after five years absence for his funeral and once more is forced to face her former life as Merak’s wife and to engage with the self-involved patricians of Basel. There, she comes across some discrepancies between the academic work of her husband and the findings of his unsuccessful rival Hans Peterson of the State Archives of Basel who drowned in the Rhine some months previously.

Laura starts to trace the causes for the diverging assessments of the two historians originating in their research on their shared point of interest: the life and work of Manuel Chrysoloras, born around 1355 in Constantinople, the author of the first Greek grammar for non-Greeks, who died during the Council of Constance. Quickly Laura comes to the conclusion that there is a connection between the disagreements between the two historians and their deaths. She gets caught in a net of secrecies and becomes a suspect herself.

In the year 17 AD the Roman poet Ovid died, having been banished to the shores of the Black Sea. With his Metamorphoses, the “Books of Transformations”, featuring stories as famous as Pyramus and Thisbe, Philemon and Baucis, Daedalus and Ikarus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea, Midas, Europa or Leda, he created a masterpiece that influenced the literature and art of the Western World over centuries up to the present day.

Two thousand years after the death of the poet in exile, the PEN-Centre for German-Speaking Writers Abroad – formerly the German PEN-Club in Exile – invited the members of all German-Speaking PEN-Centres to explore Ovid’s Metamorphoses in their own way and to follow the traces that the work of the great poet had left in their literary cosmos with stories and poems.

Who is the woman in the green dress at Grandpa’s funeral? David needs to find out. During his inquiries he comes across the story of Mauritius and his soldiers who were executed in the Valais – and of Verena who could cure the ill and work miracles. But did these stories really happen?